Star Wars Galaxies goes out with a bang!

humanji

Out with the old and in with the new... that's set before the old. As The Old Republic starts, Star Wars Galaxies ends. There's a few write ups about the place from player descibing their final moments.

Here's one from PC Gamer:

24 hours before closure, Star Wars Galaxies does something few MMOs get a chance to: declare a winner. Like the world’s longest game of Battlefield, Imperial and Rebel control is assessed city by city, planet by planet. For years, players aligned to either faction have fought for this territory: now, at the end, it all boils down to a percentage.

On Starsider, the SWG server where I spent nearly three years, the breakdown is Imperials 28%, Rebels 72%.

As I log in, I receive a transmission from Mon Mothma, the redhead Rebel with a bowl cut. “The forces of freedom have finally overthrown the tyranny of the Galactic Empire,” she says, sounding a little like George W. Bush on an aircraft carrier. “Today will mark the first day of the new Galactic Republic.” It’s also, for thousands of players across the world, the first day of The Old Republic.

For these final hours, though, SW:TOR discussion is conspicuously absent from the streets of SWG. The focus is on enjoying the variously daft and climactic events laid on by Sony Online Entertainment, on visiting old haunts before they vanish forever, and on saying goodbye to friends.

As was ever the case with SWG, the end is defined partly by what the developers have planned and partly by what the players themselves have created. Jumping the time period forward another notch (SWG began between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes back, and crawled all the way to the Battle of Hoth over the course of its 8-year life) SOE set up a PVP battleground on the forest moon of Endor. Rebels and Imperials battle to destroy the shield generator protecting the in-construction second Death Star, clashing on the ground and in the air over a small section of jungle.

In the last few months, the SWG dev team have thrown everything at the wall. This includes the long-awaited addition of atmospheric flight, where players can take their ships from a planet’s surface all the way to orbit with only a single loading screen when they reach the upper atmosphere. It’s rough around the edges – the engine struggles to load in scenery fast enough, and the narrow draw distance ensconces everything in fog – but it works, and it provides the slightest glimpse at what could have been achieved if SWG’s development had more focus and fewer dramatic U-turns.

Player ships jostle for space in the skies above Mos Eisley as the end approaches. Ceaseless fireworks fill the sky with lag-inducing particle effects and players run about in garish costumes, or their underwear, or both. There’s dancing, and crowds of veterans giving away their rarest, most valuable gear to whoever wants to play with it. A fifty-foot-tall Jedi stands in the corner, motionless, unexplained. Players break off to scrap with the increasingly ridiculous monsters thrown at them by the developers: a super-sized reptilian Krayt dragon, and a massive spear-toting Ewok known as the Megawok.

In a player-built city nearby, a member of the old guard has built a museum to the players of Starsider and their stories. Custom weapons are mounted on descriptive plaques, each describing the character who wielded them. Most of these people left the game years ago, but it’s hard to wander through it without wondering at the dedication with which these memories are preserved. It’s a touching and human counterpoint to the spectacle of SOE’s official farewell.

The death of a player-driven MMO like SWG is different to that of a more prescriptive game. What is being lost is not just the accumulated experience and credits of thousands of players, but the cities and sculptures that the advanced object manipulation system allowed players to create. Pod-racers created from hundreds of tiny parts; a custom starport built from the ground up. Unless Sony open the game up to the community, all of these are gone forever, beyond the reach of archeology.

The defeated Empire lashes out in Coronet, the capital of Han Solo’s homeworld Corellia. A to-scale Star Destroyer squats over the metropolitan skyline as players scrap (and dance, and put on hats, and spam each other) in the streets below. A few old friends and I head up in our fighters to face it, successfully whittling the monster vessel down to 50% shields before one of our X-Wings gets caught in the cross-fire and explodes dramatically. Back on the ground, the bombardment is causing everybody’s frame-rates to plummet. With twenty minutes left on the clock, we decide to see the game out somewhere quieter.

We head up in a YT-2400 freighter, a Millennium Falcon-style multiplayer vessel that can hold a whole group of players and be decorated like any other building. Slipping up through the peach-orange atmosphere of Correllia, we jump out to the space zone beyond. There, we disengage from our various stations and meet in the customised lounge. There are four of us, and our collective time with the game runs to many thousands of hours. Player-crafted space brandy is handed out, and we talk about our experiences and memories of the game. At sixty seconds to go a count-down begins, flashing across the UIs of every player still connected. We take our seats in the cockpit.

“Been fun, folks,” the pilot says. “Here we go.”

He times the hyperspace jump to coincide with the final shutdown. As the seconds tick down, the hyperdrive calculation rises to 100% complete. Autopilot kicks in, banking the ship sharply along a pre-programmed trajectory. The timer hits zero, and tiny points of light begin to streak across the windows then freeze, arrested in time. The moment hangs, the game unresponsive, one of the most iconic images in Star Wars halted before it can fully play itself out.

“You cannot connect to that Galaxy at this time. Please try again later.”

Sounds like they had a hell of a send off. And it's a bit sad that, as said in the article, so much player made content is being lost with it. I'm playing SWTOR now, and as much as I'm enjoying it, I still wish there was the level of freedom that SWG had.

Was anyone here playing in the last day?

Kiith

Read that this morning. Definitely sounds like a great way to end it, and would love to have been part of it. It's always a shame when such long lasting games shut down.

jeawan

Didnt play it after the CU/NGE as they destroyed the game for me and allot of players the game was great in the way it was free to do what you wanted and play what every class you wanted .

Selkies

jeawan wrote: »

Didnt play it after the CU/NGE as they destroyed the game for me and allot of players the game was great in the way it was free to do what you wanted and play what every class you wanted .

ditto, I miss old swg still

YEah i miss it. GAllaxies actually feels like a star wars game. I have yet to feel that in TOR

Spunge

Always heard original SWG was one of the best sandbox MMOs. Before they ruined it.

It was amazing. Given the nature of this thread - let me throw my own experience into perspective.

When I started playing I had never played an MMO before. It had no mounts, and basically you just started in a small city and went from there. They later introduced a starting "experience" but there was no starting zone at all.

Without knowing what to do, where to go or who I was - I went to a quest board and got a quest to kill some creatures that turned out to be butterflies. Whilst dieing repeatedly to these things I bumped into another new player and we shared notes. Still play with this guy (that was 2004).

Over the course of 3 months, I found civilization (though walked and swam for miles and hours to do it - not something I would have the patience for now). I started doing Sharnaff hunts on Corellia - they were higher level quests, and groups of 10+ people would get them, and go help each person do their quest before going back and handing for more credits and XP. You would go out for over an hour on these hunts, mounting up on creatures (speeders still hadn't been introduced) with creature specialists having slightly fancier mounts than the standard large chickens.

I had planned to play a Bounty Hunter (no jedi at the time) and was building my skills towards this. You don't chose a class, you chose a weapon and a skill and the more you use of that the more of that class you develop. You are limited to a set amount of learned skills however so you can't learn everything.

Skip forward around 9 months, I had gone full Bounty Hunter, and then scaled back to a pistoleer, fencer, Bounty Hunter. During those 9 months Jedi had come along, and so had defence stacking. PvP had gotten real. I had joined a large imperial guild and had built a large house on Dathomir. We neighboured the largest guild on the Server KDS who also had a pretty huge city.

PvP on a large scale had become a regular event. We would assault cities when their player constructed rebel bases were vulnerable and destroy them. People would pull out their own atat's and things would generally be quite entertaining. In SWG you didn't kill, you incapacitated and then clicked on the person and typed or macro'd /kill. You executed!

Sometimes we would all get up at 4:00AM to kill a base with a late timer. I was extremely well geared with some very rare weapons (crafting in this game was the only way to get decent items and there was huge scope for varience). As a bounty hunter, part of the base destruction sequence required my unique skill so I often got invited to these late night raids.

The other side of PvP was Bounty Hunting. Real Bounty Hunting. I had a hit squad of medics and melee, and we would hunt player jedi through the interactive system they devised. Basically I would get a quest (if a jedi did a lot of questing or was seen in public a lot they would show up more often in the terminals). Once I received the quest I would launch the first of two droids which was interstellar.

At this point I got out my stop watch. Buffs in this game took up stomach space, and had a set duration. I had all my food pre prepared and timed so that roughly when I was likely to be in combat - I would have the max buffs (health, anti knock down, extra accuracy etc etc) and would time when each item was taken to ensure this was done properly. I had a little pad with the numbers taken down. This is the level of depth SWG offered...

Once the droid tracked my target I got a planet and an initial point (usually not that accurate). After flying to the set planet I would launch my seeker droid which would give me last known location. As soon as I got my location I would launch another and get on my speeder. Eventually you would catch up with your Jedi, who would either fight or run. Fighting usually went my way as I could always survive long enough for my squad to come in and help out. When they ran it was usually a race for the jedi to get far enough away that he could log out.

It was never dull - and I used to get so damn tense on some Bounties.

Aside from the Pvp - I had a fully decorated house. You could buy hundreds of different furniture types, items, trinkets and even food. All of these could be put on the ground and the end result was some AMAZING houses and properties. On top of that, there were hundreds of cloth items so out of combat you could really give your avataar a style and persona.

All crafting was dependent on what was available at the time, and rarer items or more valuable higher quality items would spawn randomly all over the place. When you heard the going was good you would either harvest meat from specific animals or go and mine (I never did this).

There was no linear questing, no real dungeons but tons to see and do and players themselves created heaps of content. Jump to lightspeed had some cool elements, but failed to deliver in many others. It still succeeded in giving even more freedom though so in that sense it was a plus.

I stopped playing just before the New Game Experience - but the old game experience was superb and with luck, will prove to be the conceptual pre cursor to some amazing MMO down the line!

Lemming

humanji wrote: »

And it's a bit sad that, as said in the article, so much player made content is being lost with it. I'm playing SWTOR now, and as much as I'm enjoying it, I still wish there was the level of freedom that SWG had.

Was anyone here playing in the last day?

Alas, I missed the last day and am a very, very sad panda. The amount of time invested in that game by so many is staggering; all that player content lost. I played from about 6 months after launch right up until ... well ... last week. I've been on two separate beta tests for TOR and whilst it's polished & shiny, it is a simplistic game designed for lowest-common-denominator gaming. It has nowhere near the level of freedom of SWG and is notably linear and lacking in meaningful, real choices.

Spunge wrote: »

Always heard original SWG was one of the best sandbox MMOs. Before they ruined it.

Even after the CU and the NGE, it was still an astounding game. The MMO market today has nothing remotely as ambitious or as all encompassing bar - perhaps EVE Online standing as the only exception. It was a true sandbox; you decided what you wanted to do, not some linear quest progression that forced you to play what someone else wanted you to play.

Anyway, the memory book has been released; weighing in at a hefty 201mb download (PDF).

I'll finish with a screenshot taken with guild-mates (WWolf, Naboo, Farstar-Europe server) in space, forming up for a mission in the Kashyyk system

jeawan

Lemming wrote: »

Alas, I missed the last day and am a very, very sad panda. The amount of time invested in that game by so many is staggering; all that player content lost. I played from about 6 months after launch right up until ... well ... last week. I've been on two separate beta tests for TOR and whilst it's polished & shiny, it is a simplistic game designed for lowest-common-denominator gaming. It has nowhere near the level of freedom of SWG and is notably linear and lacking in meaningful, real choices.




Even after the CU and the NGE, it was still an astounding game. The MMO market today has nothing remotely as ambitious or as all encompassing bar - perhaps EVE Online standing as the only exception. It was a true sandbox; you decided what you wanted to do, not some linear quest progression that forced you to play what someone else wanted you to play.

Anyway, the memory book has been released; weighing in at a hefty 201mb download (PDF).

I'll finish with a screenshot taken with guild-mates (WWolf, Naboo, Farstar-Europe server) in space, forming up for a mission in the Kashyyk system

Lemming i played that server too man was in RD then CL for a while was called Naerbe in game big pvp head back before the CU/NGE